One of the world premieres headed for the New York Film Festival this year (September 25-October 12) Mani Haghighi’s Iranian documentary — and the fest’s most intriguingly titled — “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies.” A portrait of a painter, conceptual artist, collector, and curator whose monumental archive of Persian history borders on hoarding, the movie premieres at NYFF on September 30, and IndieWire shares a first-look exclusive clip below.
The documentary centers on artist/curator Nasser Bakhshi, whose sprawling collection of found art objects has helped preserve Iran’s pre-Islamic Republic memory. The NYFF screening will be preceded by “The Station Agent” director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest film, the short “South of Tehran,” centered on Jafar Panahi’s experience at last year’s New York Film Festival.
More on “I Deserve a Lover” courtesy of NYFF’s programming synopsis: “Among contemporary Iranian filmmakers, Mani Haghighi stands out for his refusal to conform to easy categorization or genre. His latest is a lively, stimulating, and unorthodox documentary about Nasser Bakhshi, an Iranian painter, conceptual artist, collector, and curator — and some would say hoarder — whose monumental archive of found objects and recovered non-official historical documents, from the pre-Islamic era to today, creates a sui generis record of collective memory. Situated in the northwestern city of Tabriz, Bakhshi’s museum-archive speaks to the need for individual stories, often erased by authority, to paint the larger picture. His collecting process—excavating, labeling, storing, archiving—is both an artistic and political act, one that, as Haghighi shows, inevitably intersects with Iran’s ongoing war with the U.S. and Israel. In profiling Bakhshi, alongside his partner, Roghayeh Najdi — whose surrealist paintings complement his work by commenting on the place of women in Iranian society — Haghighi comes up with a distinct visual language, one that feels in dialogue with filmmakers from Bergman to Parajanov.”
And here’s a director’s statement: “We shot this film in September 2025, three months after the end of the Twelve-Day War waged against Iran by Israel and the United States, and four months before the massacre of Iranian protesters by government forces the following winter. The most insidious effect of that period on me was a kind of mental paralysis: there was nothing I could do about what was happening around me, and the coordinates of my life were no longer mine to determine. Making this film was about bringing my friends together in the middle of that vast, moronic darkness in order to concentrate on images and words that could still mean something to us. I decided to make a film about a pair of artists and the archive of seemingly random material they kept in their house.
“The house we walked into had the atmosphere of deranged hoarding shaped by obsessive order. It was clear that Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi’s relationship to their belongings was inseparable from who they were: a singular couple and their sprawling archive, two obscurities locked in a private language. I decided to follow a series of stories about the people and objects in that archive, hoping they might conjure an oblique portrait of Bakhshi and Najdi along the way. It soon became clear that everything I was doing was itself becoming part of the archive I was trying to capture. I wasn’t simply making a film about it: I was entering it and feeding it. But this time, ceding control felt like liberation.”
“I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies” world-premieres at the 2026 New York Film Festival on Wednesday, September 30.
